Extracting the Stone of Madness

Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 unearths this extraordinary poet for English readers in a bilingual edition that spans the heights of Pizarnik’s oeuvre.
In her brief life, Pizarnik produced an astonishingly powerful body of work. In her own words, she was drawn “to the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.” Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness, and death, Pizarnik explores the shifting valences of the self and the vague border between speech and silence. This compilation of poems includes the full collections of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse.